Cruising Portugal’s Enticing Douro River Valley

Jodi Campbell, professor emerita of Texas Christian University (TCU), earned her PhD in European history from the University of Minnesota and a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain. Her fascination with Spain comes from its rich diversity of past and present cultures—Celtic, Roman, Muslim, Castilian, Basque, Catalan—and how its history is preserved, interpreted, and disputed. She has walked across several hundred miles of Spain, following the medieval pilgrimage trails to Santiago. As a historian, she is interested in how ordinary people in the past understood and maintained their relationships and communities, and how we in the present choose to tell stories about the past. She has published several books and articles on Spanish history and culture, including At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain and Theater of Negotiation: Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid, and is co-editor of the new Routledge Handbook of the History of Madrid. Her academic honors include TCU Honors Professor of the Year in Teaching and the A.M. Pate, Jr. Research Professorship.

Recently retired from university teaching, Jodi now lives in Madrid and spends her time seeking out interesting new corners of Spain and burrowing into archives to sift through centuries-old documents and listen to the voices of the past.

Juan Carlos Sola Corbacho was born in Madrid and completed his PhD in history and geography at the University Complutense de Madrid. After teaching and researching in Mexico City, he began an academic career in the U.S., teaching early modern and modern European history, and later Spanish culture, at Centenary College in Louisiana and Texas Christian University. He then joined the faculty at John V. Roach Honors College, where he taught variety of interdisciplinary courses and was recognized by the students as best professor of the year in 2016.

To incorporate an international perspective into his teaching, Juan Carlos developed new courses that connected American students with professors and students from Bulgaria, Romania, Peru, and Poland—creating the first virtual classroom on campus via videoconference (long before Zoom!). He also taught classes on contemporary global issues, inviting numerous activists from around the world to be interviewed in class. His research interests include the commercial networks created by 18th-century immigrants in Madrid and Mexico City, and his current work examines the first European newspapers published in Western Europe.

Dr. Allen Fromherz is a professor of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2002 and received his PhD in Medieval Islamic History from St. Andrews University in Scotland in 2006. Allen’s first two books, The Almohads: the Rise of an Islamic Empire and Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times examine the rise of empire in medieval North Africa and Iberia. His book The Near West: North Africa and Europe traces the history of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish interactions across the Western Mediterranean, especially in Iberia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Italy. He has been a senior Fulbright grantee to Spain and is completing a book on the life and times of Ibn al-Khatib, a 14th-century polymath and minister who wrote poetry for the Alhambra in Granada. 

Allen previously held international fellowships from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, and a senior humanities grant from NYU Abu Dhabi. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the Edinburgh Book Series on the Maghreb (North Africa). He currently leads studies abroad for his students at Georgia State, including the popular Marvels of Medieval Spain: the Culture and History of Muslims, Jews, and Christians and a study abroad to Italy. His regular classes on the Middle East, North Africa, medieval Italy and Spain, and the Mediterranean focus on encounters between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Dr. Mariana Nabais is a Portuguese Palaeolithic archaeologist whose work brings the Ice Age vividly to life by focusing on the most down-to-earth clues of all: what people ate, hunted, gathered and carried home. She is currently principal investigator of two Foundation for Science and Technology–funded projects, PALAEO.WEST.IBERIA and PALAEO.ZOOARCH, which investigate Early, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites and long-term human-animal interactions in Portugal.

Trained at University College London, where she earned her PhD, Mariana has combined research with hands-on teaching for much of her career. Her field experience ranges from Iberian Palaeolithic to Roman period sites, leading excavations and training new archaeologists through the field school she founded and directs, South-West Archaeology Digs (SWAD). Her work has been featured widely in international media, including The New York Times, CNN and BBC News. When she is not in the lab or at a dig, she enjoys traveling and discovering different natural landscapes and cultural heritage sites.

Nicholas R. Jones (Yale University) is the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s Scholar-in-Residence at New York University (2021-2022). He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits The Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham. Jones’s research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as has held visiting professorships at Georgetown University and New York University. His new, single-authored book, Cervantine Blackness, will be published in November 2024 by Penn State University Press.

Dr. Paul B. Sturtevant has been enthralled with the Middle Ages since he began building balsa wood castles for his toy knights when he was eight years old. Fast-forwarding just a little, he has now become an expert on the contemporary public’s understanding of the Middle Ages. In the intervening years, after a brief career as an actor, he moved to the United Kingdom where he earned his master’s and his Ph.D. from the Universities of York and Leeds, respectively. He then taught for universities in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Portugal on subjects as diverse as medieval history, film theory, and museum studies.

Paul has published widely on the intersection of contemporary issues and the medieval past both in academic books and also public venues like the Washington Post and BBC News. He is particularly fond of two of his stories, one in which he successfully debunked a pernicious ghost story about one of his ancestors, and another on the history of American barbecue. He founded and ran an award-winning medieval history online magazine called The Public Medievalist, and worked for a decade for the Smithsonian Institution as an audience research specialist. Paul now lives with his partner in Portugal, where they are developing cutting-edge, historical study abroad-style experiences for visitors to Europe.

Kerri Lesh is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who has lived in various parts of Spain over the course of her academic career. She received her PhD from the University of Nevada, Reno, having conducted research on minoritized languages, tourism, and gastronomy. Her particular interest focuses on how culture and language intersect with gastronomy. She returns to Spain as much as she can to meet with both academics and local food and wine producers. Kerri has fond memories of having completed a portion of the Camino de Santiago, marveling at the wonders of the Alhambra, wandering through Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, and walking among the vineyards in the verdant coastal regions of the Basque Country and Galicia. She is at her happiest when eating and drinking and talking about eating and drinking.

Kerri is also a Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW), having worked harvests in both Chile and the Basque Country. She is currently based in Kansas City, dividing her time between working at a local vineyard, teaching for the Culinary Center of Kansas City, and teaching in the anthropology department at a local college. Kerri has taught courses in Basque culture, Indigenous and minoritized languages, linguistic anthropology, and the anthropology of food and wine. She has published several articles in journals such as Anthropology of Food, Applied Linguistics Review, and BOGA: Basque Studies Consortium Journal.

Dr. Roger Martínez-Dávila is a specialist in medieval and Renaissance Europe who has dedicated his life to better understanding intercultural and interreligious relations. In particular, he tracks the lives of religious and cultural minorities in Iberia – such as Sephardic Jews and Muslims or resilient communities like the Basque. 

Roger has visited every province of Spain over his 20-year career, and his travel and life abroad reflect his global perspective of the Middle Ages, drawing together the mixed Mediterranean and Gothic cultures of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa, as well as the Frankish and Germanic peoples of France and the Low Countries. He is also researching how Scandinavia, the Islamic Levant, and Arabia contributed to Europe’s medieval civilization.

Presently a professor of history at the University of Colorado and previously a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universidad de Carlos III de Madrid, Roger is an authority on medieval manuscripts and material culture. He relishes the opportunity to share his stories of investigating special Papal collections at the Vatican’s Secret Archive and Inquisition cases in the archives of Madrid and Lisbon.

Roger holds a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in public policy from the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain as well as Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities, based on an exhibition he helped curate for the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe. 

Tim Richardson is a leading historian of gardens, art, architecture, and food and the author of more than 25 acclaimed books, including Great Gardens of America, The English Landscape Garden, and Sweets: A History of Candy. After studying English literature at Oxford, Tim began his career at Country Life magazine, where he became the gardens editor and theater critic for 23 years. He went on to write for a wide range of publications, as a long-time columnist for the Daily Telegraph, landscape editor for Wallpaper,* and contributor to Literary Review and the Financial Times. He is currently art critic at The Idler magazine.   

Tim is known for his witty and sometimes irreverent style; a collection of his garden journalism was entitled You Should Have Been Here Last Week, because, he says, that is what garden owners always seem to say. This mischievous spirit led him to found the Chelsea Fringe Festival in 2012—as an adjunct to the famous Chelsea Flower Show but with an emphasis on community gardening and artistic happenings. It has been the platform for more than 2,500 events in some 22 countries. Tim volunteers as an advisor to the National Trust in the United Kingdom and works as a consultant on historic gardens and houses.  

As a visiting professor at Vienna University for several years, Tim taught landscape art—and enjoyed the cafes and cakes! He now teaches a master’s course in landscape history at London University; and wrote an online course on the topic that is taught at Oxford University's continuing education department. Tim lives in London and Devon with his wife, Claire, and enjoys competing in the sport of fencing. 

Adriana Méndez Rodenas is an expert in Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture. A PhD in romance studies from Cornell University, she is professor emerita of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. She directed the Afro-Romance Institute at the University of Missouri, where she is now professor emerita.

Adriana’s research and writing on the Caribbean in the 19th century explores Spanish colonialism, the rise of anti-slavery narrative, and the emergence of national identities. Born in Havana, she has published amply on women writers who cross linguistic and national borders, as in her book, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (1998), and her essay on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a major figure of Spanish romanticism, which was published in The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature in 2024.

Adriana’s love of travel sparked her interest in the genre of travel writing. Her book, Transatlantic Travels to Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2014) resurrects the stories of women adventurers who crossed the Atlantic during the turbulent period leading to Spanish American independence. Adriana’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at Uppsala University, Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, and the Huntington Library.

Now she turns her love of travel to lecturing for a wider audience. Her topics include the legacy left behind by the colonial histories of Spain and Portugal. She has lectured on Panama’s early colonial history as well as on the men and women who made the Panama Canal. Bridging archival research with visual and literary culture, her lectures aim to bring the places visited come alive for her fellow travelers.

Benjamin Sutherland writes for The Economist, reporting on military and defense issues as well as energy, business, science, and political culture. He edited Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence, an Economist book on how advances in weaponry and spycraft are reshaping global security, and wrote a chapter on the future of warfare for the book Megatech: Technology in 2050. He also contributes to Economist podcasts.

Benjamin periodically teaches undergraduate, graduate and MBA courses in geopolitics and international business as an adjunct. In recent years, he has taught at HEC-Paris; the Paris School of Business; the Zagreb School of Economics and Management; and, in Italy, H-Farm College and Scuola Holden. Earlier in his career, he wrote for Newsweek and was a senior editor at COLORS magazine. He also served as a staff screenwriter with Cinemarket Productions in Paris, and co-directed the Sundance Channel documentary Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man.

As an expert for Smithsonian Journeys, Benjamin has focused on Europe, the Persian Gulf, and the broader Middle East. His lectures cast light on a broad range of geopolitical topics, from Central Europe’s reemergence as a geopolitical pivot in the struggle between authoritarian states and free societies to Russia’s grand strategy and its geographic roots, to clashes in civilizational visions for world order. His lectures are richly illustrated with insights from his reporting for The Economist in more than a dozen countries. An avid traveler, Sutherland speaks French and Italian fluently and is proficient in Spanish.

Dr. Ralph L. DeFalco III is a historian, a writer, a lecturer, and a retired national security intelligence professional whose career spanned five decades. He achieved the rank of captain during 25 years in the United States Navy and later served as a civilian intelligence professional on the Pentagon staff of the director of naval intelligence. Ralph is a graduate and former faculty member of the National Intelligence University and the College of Naval Command and Staff of the U.S. Naval War College, where he served as Fleet Professor. He earned his doctoral degree at Georgetown University.

Ralph has studied and published widely on topics ranging from military history and geopolitics to foreign affairs and applied ethics.  He is a contributing author to the two-volume work, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Encyclopedia of Covert Ops, Intelligence Gathering, and Spies and his numerous essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in various websites and publications, including Naval History Magazine, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, National Strategy Forum Review, and H-net.

Samuel Amago is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, where he serves as Chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. He is a former Chair of the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from 2003 to 2010 he taught at the University of Notre Dame. Together with colleagues at UVA, he is currently working to launch the Global Spanish Initiative, a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research and creative collaboration that reaches beyond the geographical confines of traditional area studies to include all those places where Spanish is or has been spoken, across the Americas, Brazil, Iberia, the Philippines, North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and beyond.

At UVA, Professor Amago teaches courses on Spanish and Portuguese film and cultural studies, with a focus on modern and contemporary Iberia. His most recent book is Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain (U of Virginia Press, 2021), which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. 

He is a native of Madrid, Spain, and grew up in Pasadena, California. As a faculty expert, he has traveled throughout Portugal and Spain with Smithsonian Journeys. 

Brian Aivars Catlos is currently a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a research associate in humanities at the University of California Santa Cruz. His work centers on Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations and ethno-religious identity in medieval Europe and the Islamic World, and the history of the pre-modern Mediterranean. A board member of various academic journals, he also co-directs the Mediterranean Seminar, a forum for international and interdisciplinary collaboration in the emerging field of Mediterranean studies. Brian has published a number of award-winning books which have been translated into eight languages, including Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Power Faith and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad, and Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain.

Brian’s awards and distinctions include the Governor-General of Canada's Gold Medal for Academic Achievement and two National Endowment for the Humanities research fellowships among many others. He has worked and studied in Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ecuador, the US, Canada, Syria and Israel, and has traveled extensively in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.